The surreal world: television delves into paranoia, anxiety and disinformation
The surreal world: television delves into paranoia, anxiety and disinformation
In the 1970s, conspiracy thrillers such as "All the President's Men," "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor" captured the Mood of the Watergate era. Now, a series of new television dramas are exploring the problems that are troubling today's society, from technological discomfort to generalized surveillance to the questioning of the truth, with characters that struggle to maintain control over reality.
In the Amazon series "Homecoming," which begins airing on Friday, Julia Roberts plays a caseworker who treats veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. That story alternates with a four-year game in the future, when his government-funded program, called Homecoming, is under investigation. The character of Mrs. Roberts, who lives with her mother (Sissy Spacek), has to look into her memories, or the lack of them, to reconstruct how the experiment went on its side.
The new TV shots about the conspiracy genre are often clinical, with protagonists who are in mysterious institutions, questioned by therapists and navigating psychotic escapades.
In "Maniac", starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, and premiered by
Last month, laboratory patients undertake surreal mental journeys to free themselves from past traumas. The FX series "Legion" immerses viewers in the mind-boggling perspective of the character of Dan Stevens, who confuses his emerging mutant powers with schizophrenia.
On Showtime's "Homeland," a bipolar counterterrorism agent played by Claire Danes sometimes confuses paranoia with intestinal intuition. She has been hospitalized several times throughout the show, which is scheduled to end next year after her eighth season.
Sam Esmail, the executive producer and director of "Homecoming," also created one of the most striking examples of this subgenre of TV in "Mr. Robot." The US series, which is already preparing its fourth and final season for the next year, it revolves around a computer hacker (Rami Malek, who won an Emmy for his performance) that was perceived as the center of a global corporate plot.He, along with the public, has to constantly measure How much of your cataclysmic vision of the world is real?.
Jonah Hill and Emma Stone star in the Netflix series 'Maniac'.
Photo:
Netflix
Mr. Esmail says the fear of cheating torments the characters in his two shows, including a veteran at the center of the "Homecoming" mystery (played by Stephan James) who initially trusts his treatment regimen. "They're in a box, but that box is in a bigger box," says Mr. Esmail.
That feeling that reality is slipping away is something that he believes resonates with viewers disturbed by the spread of disinformation and the erosion of privacy.
In "Legion" on FX, Dan Stevens plays David Haller, a man who confuses his emerging powers with schizophrenia.
Photo:
FX
"It feels subconscious, but there is something in our relationship with the world around us that seems frayed, and more and more frayed, at least for me," says Mr. Esmail.
The executive producer of "Homeland," Alex Gansa, says that the symbolism in mental illness of Ms. Danes's character has only been exacerbated in the years since the program's debut in 2011.
"Even then, 10 years after 9-11, we felt that his bipolar condition really reflected what was happening in the United States in terms of how polarized the country had become. But that pales in comparison to the way things are now. "
"Homecoming" initially it was a podcast, released by Gimlet Media in 2016 and with a cast surprisingly full of stars. Catherine Keener, who was the first to sign, played Heidi Bergman, the character that Mrs. Roberts plays in the television adaptation. Oscar Isaac was James' audio homologue as the troubled veteran, while David Schwimmer played a man from the company that launched the Homecoming program (played on television by Bobby Cannavale).
The creators of the podcast, Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz, also wrote and performed the adaptation for TV. When Mr. Esmail joined to direct it, he expanded the story to a different medium by drawing in the tense cinema of the seventies. For example, most of the music in "Homecoming" is from that era, using scores taken from films directed by Brian De Palma, Alan J. Pakula and John Carpenter.
The director of "Homecoming" Sam Esmail, on the left, behind the stage with the actor Bobby Cannavale.
Photo:
Amazon Prime Video
Mr. Esmail developed the "Homecoming" style with many of his "Mr. Robot" collaborators, including cinematographer Tod Campbell and production designer Anastasia White. They tried to create a world in which the characters deal with incomplete information in environments that feel crooked.
The octagonal office where Mrs. Roberts conducts counseling sessions creates a fishbowl effect. "You can move the camera and it always feels circular, as if there is no way out and anyone can look," says Mr. Esmail.
In an unusual visual technique, "Homecoming" uses standard wide-screen shots during scenes from the past, before the Homecoming program unravels, but reduces the frame to a square when the story progresses.
That adds a claustrophobic urgency to the therapist's search for facts, says Mr. Esmail: "Boxes inside boxes."
As a director, Mr. Esmail is known for that kind of unorthodox camera work, intentionally framing the characters outside the center or surrounded by strange spaces. "Sam would enter a room and his first question would be" Is the roof going to fall? "Because I wanted to shoot from above," Bloomberg recalls.
"We want absolute control over how we design the shot," says Mr. Esmail, especially for scenes of people in a facility designed for surveillance. "They are under a microscope."
Write to John Jurgensen in john.jurgensen@wsj.com
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